High school physics education issues as seen by some California teachers: From content standards to critical thinking

Sunday, September 04, 2016

Perusall Trial Update

Back in June I wrote a Blog of Phyz post about the social media textbook reading website Perusall. I set up a Perusall class for teachers to try out. I posted a reading assignment, a paper by Joe Redish called Changing Student Ways of Knowing. I invited teachers to create a student account and participate by reading and commenting on this article. I promised to release grades on September 1st. Thirty-two teachers registered for my Perusall class and took a look at what Perusall can do. Seven teachers left a total of 18 comments. The artificial intelligent agent that scores comments on Perusall gave twelve the maximum score of 2, six received a score of 1. There were no zeros! These were pretty good scores compared to what my students averaged.

I was a little disappointed by the amount of participation in the teacher trial of Perusall. Because the default for automatic grading is 15 students, I had to ask their tech support to grade the assignment. The discussion would have been more interesting if we had a group of 20 commenting like I used with my students. Perhaps I didn't pick an interesting enough article. I still believe in the potential of this tool that encourages students to read textbooks by making it more relevant and useful for them. I am about to start using Perusall in this year's classes. I will use it for the full year and collect data about students use and perceptions. Perusall is free if you upload your own readings, I use the OpenStax physics textbook. Look for another update about Perusall next summer and maybe another teacher trial.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this blog are those of the post authors and commenters. They are not necessarily those of The San Juan Unified School District, The California Department of Education, Pearson Education (or any of its imprints).